https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/08/arts/television/conrad-janis-dead.html
Conrad Janis, Father on ‘Mork & Mindy’ and Much More, Dies at 94
His role on the hit sitcom was just one of more than 100 film and television credits; he was also a fine jazz trombonist and co-owner of an art gallery.
By Neil Genzlinger
March 8, 2022, 6:05 p.m. ET

Conrad Janis, an actor familiar to television viewers as Mindy’s father on the hit sitcom “Mork & Mindy” who was also a skilled jazz musician and a gallerist well known in the New York art world, died on March 1 in Los Angeles. He was 94.

Dean A. Avedon, his business manager, confirmed the death.

Mr. Janis, a child of the noted art collectors and gallerists Sidney and Harriet (Grossman) Janis, moved easily between the worlds of high art, jazz and acting, sometimes switching one hat for another in the same evening.

“Conrad Janis Is Glad to Live Three Lives,” the headline on a 1962 Newsday article read. At the time he was starring in the romantic comedy “Sunday in New York” on Broadway and, after the Friday and Saturday night performances, playing trombone with his group, the Tailgate 5, at Central Plaza in Manhattan. (On Sundays he’d trek to Brooklyn to play at the club Caton Corner.) When not onstage or on the bandstand, he could often be found at his father’s art gallery.

Sixteen years later he found himself on one of the most popular shows on television when he was cast on “Mork & Mindy,” which premiered in September 1978, as the father of Mindy (Pam Dawber), a Colorado woman who befriends an eccentric alien (Robin Williams). On Sundays during this period, he played in the Beverly Hills Unlisted Jazz Band at the Ginger Man, a club in Beverly Hills, Calif., whose owners included Carroll O’Connor of “All in the Family.”

The key to juggling three areas of expertise, Mr. Janis told Newsday, was keeping his personas separate.

“It just wouldn’t do to tell a knowledgeable art patron that ‘man, I dig Picasso the wildest,’” he said.

[CAPTION: Mr. Janis, an accomplished trombonist as well as a busy actor, peformed regularly with the Beverly Hills Unlisted Jazz Band. Among the other members of the band, seen in performance in 1980, was his fellow actor George Segal, who played banjo and sang. Credit...Ralph Dominguez/MediaPunch, via Alamy]

Conrad Janis was born on Feb. 11, 1928, in Manhattan. His parents had a successful shirt-making business early in their married life, which gave them the wherewithal to begin collecting art and, in 1948, open the Sidney Janis Gallery, which became, as The New York Times put it in Sidney Janis’s obituary in 1989, “a major pacesetter for the art world in the 1950s and ’60s.”

Harriet Janis also wrote books with the jazz historian Rudi Blesh, including “They All Played Ragtime” (1950). That connection led to Conrad’s musical expertise. Mr. Blesh’s daughter played trombone in her school’s marching band but lost interest; the spare trombone ended up in Conrad’s hands. He particularly studied the music of the influential New Orleans trombonist and bandleader Kid Ory.

“I memorized a lot of what he did,” he told The Los Angeles Times in 1988.

His acting developed alongside his musicianship. When he was 13, a classmate at the Little Red School House in Manhattan told him that “Junior Miss,” a popular Broadway comedy about a teenage girl, was holding auditions for a road company. He auditioned, got in, and spent two years with the tour, advancing to a leading juvenile role. He started doing radio voice work at the same time.

“I played kids of 14 and old men of 40” on the radio, he told The New York Times in a 1945 interview.

He landed a role in the pre-Broadway run of “The Dark of the Moon,” which got him noticed by a Hollywood talent scout. He remained with the play when it went to New York, making his Broadway debut in March 1945, but within a few months he was on the West Coast to make his first film, the comedy “Snafu,” in which he played a teenager who lies about his age to enlist.

It was the first of more than 100 film and television credits. In the movies, he played alongside some famous names: Ronald Reagan and Shirley Temple in the notoriously bad “That Hagan Girl” (1947), Charlton Heston and other prominent stars in “Airport 1975” (1974), Lynn Redgrave in “The Happy Hooker” (1975), George Burns in “Oh God! Book II” (1980).

He was on television from the medium’s earliest days, playing numerous roles in the late 1940s and ’50s, many of them on shows like “Suspense,” “Actor’s Studio” and “The Philco Television Playhouse” that were broadcast live. Some of those roles took advantage of his familiarity with musical instruments.

“All through the ’50s,” he told The Philadelphia Inquirer in 1981, “I was in so many TV shows as a young musician on drugs, desperately trying to kick the habit, that I’m sure I helped cement in the public’s mind a relationship between musicians and dope. All they cast me in were shows in which I did or didn’t kick the habit. I was always saying, ‘Hey, man, I just got to have a fix.’”

He continued to play small parts on TV in the 1960s and ’70s before landing his best-known role, Mindy’s father. His character operated a music store, but although “Mork & Mindy” ran for four seasons, he never got a chance to play his trombone on the show, something he regretted.

“The producers wouldn’t go for it,” he told The Albany Democrat-Herald of Oregon in 1990. “We had a really cute script where I got together with my old Dixieland jazz band, but they didn’t think it was funny enough.”

He continued to work in television after “Mork,” with appearances on “St. Elsewhere,” “Murder, She Wrote,” “Frasier” and other shows. His later movie appearances included small roles in “Mr. Saturday Night” (1992) and “The Cable Guy” (1996). He sometimes collaborated with his wife, Maria Grimm, including directing two movies she wrote, “The Feminine Touch” (1995) and “Bad Blood” (2012).

Mr. Janis’s acting career also included a dozen Broadway credits, among them the Gore Vidal play “A Visit to a Small Planet” in 1957 and a revival of “The Front Page” in 1969.

Throughout his musical and acting adventures, Mr. Janis also kept a hand in the art world.

Arne Glimcher, the founder and chairman of Pace Gallery and a friend of Mr. Janis’s for almost 60 years, said Mr. Janis worked for his father at the Sidney Janis Gallery and was responsible for certain artists there, including Claes Oldenburg and Tom Wesselmann.

“His knowledge of 20th-century art and Modernism was really encyclopedic,” Mr. Glimcher said in a phone interview.

When Sidney Janis reached 90, he turned the Janis Gallery over to Conrad and his brother, Carroll, who kept it going until 1999.

Mr. Janis’s first marriage, to Vicki Quarles, ended in divorce, as did his second, to Ronda Copland. Ms. Grimm, whom he married in 1987, died in September. He is survived by his brother; two children from his first marriage, Christopher and Carin Janis; two grandchildren; and two great-grandchildren.

Mr. Glimcher said that in recent years some of Mr. Janis’s old jazz pals would come to his home in Beverly Hills on Thursdays and play. When his wife died, Mr. Glimcher said, Mr. Janis gave her a jazz funeral, then changed the location of those jam sessions.

“Every Thursday,” Mr. Glimcher said, “he took the jazz band to her mausoleum and played there.”

Neil Genzlinger is a writer for the Obituaries desk. Previously he was a television, film and theater critic. @genznyt • Facebook

© 2022 The New York Times Company

Carson used to book The Beverly Hills Unlisted Jazz Band recurrently...but ONLY (the late and great) George Segal ever got to sit down with Johnny after their performances; the late Janis would be relegated to merely receiving a wave of Carson's hand from the desk.

And the "More & Mindy" suits thought that proposed trombone-playing script wasn't funny enough ?!?

I would argue the ENTIRE DARNED ABC SITCOM was not funny enough--actually, not funny in the LEAST! This was mainly due to the fact that the scripts were so beholden to Robin Williams's punishingly unfunny riffing. And even out-of-character from his insipid Mork character, Williams was unrelentingly and embarassingly self-indulgent in his supposedly inspired improvisational bits.

Of course, a jerk like Williams--who in Hollywood was widely-resented among the stand-up comic community for being an unrepentant joke thief--getting unearned laughs for his look-at-me! style of routine is all too common in showbiz; just consider how far Don Rickles got with non-sensical ranting ("You're a hockey puck!").

BRYAN STYBLE/Florida

On Wednesday, March 9, 2022 at 1:26:22 AM UTC-5, radioacti...@gmail.com wrote:
> Carson used to book The Beverly Hills Unlisted Jazz Band recurrently...but ONLY (the late and great) George Segal ever got to sit down with Johnny after their performances; the late Janis would be relegated to merely receiving a wave of Carson's hand from the desk.

Not true. Janis appeared as an interview guest at least once, in 1980. He told the story (quoted in the obituary) about how he often played a drug-addicted musician in his early TV days and felt he had inadvertently contributed to the image of musicians as drug addicts.

When the episode aired, NBC bleeped out the word "drugs" (which Mr. Janis said several times) because they were so paranoid about accusations of glorifying drug use that network censors had banned any use of the word, even in a harmless context. (I believe this may have been when the episode aired as a repeat in 1981 or 1982, in the middle of Nancy Reagan's "Just Say No" campaign.)

Thanks for the correction, Diner; clearly, I missed that edition of "The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson", as well as on repeat. Probably watching Merv and Arthur Treacher that night.

Or perhaps tuned instead to KNX/Los Angeles at 1070 kHz, for its nightly airing of the CBS Mystery Radio Theatre, hosted by the late E.G. Marshall?

STYBLE/Florida